Anthropic Raises $5B from Amazon in Exchange for $100B in Cloud Spending

Amazon has invested another $5 billion in Anthropic — and received in return a commitment: the AI startup will spend $100 billion on AWS cloud infrastructure. The deal instantly became one of the most discussed in the industry — not so much because of the sum, but because of its structure. The scheme works like this: Amazon invests money in Anthropic, and Anthropic in turn makes long-term commitments to use AWS computing power.

In other words, money flows from the corporation to a portfolio company — and returns as revenue. TechCrunch calls this a "circular AI deal," and Amazon itself describes it in these terms. This is not Amazon's first investment in Anthropic.

In 2023, the company pledged up to $4 billion. In 2024, it added another $2.75 billion.

Now, accounting for the new tranche, Amazon's total commitments exceed $8 billion. This puts them on par with Microsoft, which has invested comparable sums in OpenAI. The commitment to spend $100 billion on AWS looks astronomical — but in the context of the AI race, the figures don't seem fantastical.

Training and inference of large language models require massive computational resources. $100 billion is not an advance for a year, but a multi-year commitment over a horizon of 5-10 years, distributed as the company's needs grow. For Amazon AWS, it is strategically important to retain Anthropic on its platform and prevent Google or Microsoft from poaching this client.

Anthropic already uses AWS for training Claude series models. In parallel, the parties are developing joint products: Anthropic provides models through Amazon Bedrock — AWS's enterprise AI service. Such circular schemes raise questions with regulators.

When a large technology company invests money in an AI startup, and that startup commits to spending it back — the line between strategic partnership and hidden merger becomes blurred. Antitrust authorities in the US and Europe are already studying such structures. While no deal has been blocked yet, regulatory pressure is increasing.

For the industry, this round is a signal: the race for computational infrastructure is accelerating. Companies that control GPU clusters and cloud platforms gain structural advantage — they finance AI companies and simultaneously profit from their growth. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are building exactly such closed ecosystems.

Anthropic meanwhile remains one of the few independent AI labs with real chances to compete with OpenAI at the level of foundational models. The new round provides a financial cushion and infrastructure access — but simultaneously strengthens dependence on a single cloud provider.